As a small player in the highly competitive global airline industry Air New Zealand has very little media budget to spend in offshore markets compared to its competitors. So it has to rely heavily on the strength of its content or creative ideas to earn, rather than pay, for media.

The challenge therefore is to deliver engagement on a mass global scale with a tiny New Zealand media budget.

In 2011 the challenge was set to push much further into the global market by using the airplane safety video medium in a new and standalone way, with no integrated campaign to support it.

The resulting Fit to Fly safety video featuring the energetic fitness guru Richard Simmons, did achieve an extraordinary level of international engagement and media including 2.3 million views on YouTube and one million on the Chinese equivalent YouKu (classed as a phenomenal success for an English language video). Thirty three percent of the views were out of China and 23 percent out of the US demonstrating the global nature of the results.  A small spend in seeding and media costs returned 378 million media impressions in the US at an estimated value of more than $3.25 million. In turn, post the campaign, New Zealanders who viewed Air NZ “as a company they could be proud of” increased by 11 percent.